I started to watch Michael Gove's Conservative party conference speech online and on a train. After the first sentence, in which he announced that he was going to tell his audience "what is changing", I was treated to 30 minutes of the secretary of state "buffering" as the internet connection faltered, so I amused myself by writing my own speech about "what is not changing". It goes something like this...

We still have the same old hierarchical and stratified school system. Even the vice-chair of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (who should know a bit about social segregation) last week raged about schools being "racial silos" – even if he did neatly sidestep the role that his own sector plays in sorting children by ethnicity, class and family income.

Government policy persistently endorses this sort of behaviour. As the founder of the new Bristol free school, situated in a disadvantaged community, but giving priority access to children from a more affluent postcode, explained in a recent interview: "Being a free school gives us the right to choose our catchment area".

Meanwhile, the mass centralisation of education continues apace. For an elegant and incisive account of this, I recommend a recent lecture by Sir Tim Brighouse to the Oxford Education Society. It includes several killer facts, but my favourite is the following.

Before 1988, the Secretary of State for Education enjoyed three powers of direction. As a result of the 1988 Act, he gained over 250. He now has 2,000 powers and is gathering more by the day via the funding agreements he signs with the growing number of independent state schools. Forget about autonomy and localism. Control and influence increasingly reside in Whitehall, where decisions are made, strings are pulled and budgets manipulated, secretly and often in cahoots with the predatory edu-chains.

In the summer, I spent some time investigating the structures and finances of these chains using information freely available on the Charity Commission website. Yet in the last few months, most of these chains have become "exempt charities" and are no longer required to submit their annual reports and financial statements to the Charity Commission for publication, nor do their budgets appear on the government's new Go Compare! website. The more schools they acquire, the more public money they rake in, and the more profit-making arms they set up, the less accountable they become.

Then there is the rapid and continuing marginalisation of maintained schools. A million pupils may now be educated in academies, but that leaves 7 million who aren't, yet their schools have become invisible. Ministers don't visit them or talk about them and a visitor from Mars could be forgiven for thinking that only a handful of academies educate black children, or send any disadvantaged sixth-formers to university. The Department for Education's own website lists "types of schools", but makes no mention of community, foundation or voluntary aided schools, which still educate the majority, but have ceased to exist officially.

So contested, confused and opaque has the organisation and governance of schools become that London barrister and education law specialist David Wolfe has set up his own website appropriately named "A can of worms" to advise and help parents, teachers and governors who are concerned about the legal ramifications of changes taking place in their schools and communities.

Finally, there is little chance of this approach changing, at least in the short term. The Tories have only got one script and Labour daren't attack it because, even though they introduced many welcome reforms, they also set in train changes that the coalition is now ruthlessly exploiting and they failed to tackle deep-seated issues such as selection, charitable status for private schools and the balance between vocational and academic education.

Standards will continue to rise, incrementally, as they have done for the last 20 years, because pupils, teachers, heads and governors in all those schools that are never mentioned will continue to work hard at improvement. But new perverse incentives in the accountability system (like phonics tests and the EBacc) will eat away at the idea of a rounded, creative and enjoyable education.

And, as with all highly diverse school systems, there will be winners and losers. In the year since we started the Local Schools Network website, it has been clear that for every parent group that is benefiting from reforms, there is another that is bitter about the failure to support, celebrate or invest in their local schools.

The OECD data, both treasured and misused by Gove, continues to prove that the best-performing countries are the most inclusive, separating children neither academically nor geographically. The London Challenge, pioneered by Brighouse, showed what collaboration and partnerships, rather than competition and fragmentation, can achieve. There are real changes that could be made. It is just that no one has the courage to articulate them yet.